RAQQA, Syria (North Press) – The family of the 49-year-old Fawaz al-Dghemi has shared the same tent with his brother’s family for more than a month. Due to poverty, they cannot repair his brother’s tent or buy a new one. So, they are forced to live together.
Al-Dghemi recalled when his brother’s children and wife started to cry when a storm torn apart their tent at the beginning of June.
Al-Dghemi, who is from the countryside of Homs and live in al-Daher camp in the southern countryside of Raqqa Governorate, took his three nephews, the oldest of whom is 5 years old, and their mother to his tent to stay in till the end of the storm.
Misery and distress are evident on the faces of the camp’s residents, especially al-Dghemi family, which were terribly affected by the storm.
The IDP told North Press that his brother did not re-build his tent because it was almost completely torn and its poles were destroyed.
Al-Dghemi, who is a father of seven children, the eldest of whom is 20-year-old girl, says, “In summer, we can stay outside the tent, but the problem is that winter is coming.”
In the aforementioned camp, as in all squatter camps in Raqqa, most of the displaced families live in bad conditions, due to lack of humanitarian aid that hardly they them access to.
There are 58 squatter camps in Raqqa, northern Syria, which shelter 90.000 IDPs, according to the Office of Camps and Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) Affairs in the Raqqa Civil Council.
The Raqqa Civil Council is affiliated with Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES).
The AANES was first formed in 2014 in the Kurdish-majority regions of Afrin, Kobani and Jazira in northern Syria following the withdrawal of the government forces. Later, it was expanded to Manbij, Tabqa, Raqqa, Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) defeated ISIS militarily.
Most of the IDPs in these camps are children, women and elderly, including thousands of patients, persons with special needs and wounded due war who hardly find what keeps them alive.
The IDPs in the squatter camps hail from areas of the countryside of Aleppo, Homs and Hama. They left their areas before Syrian government forces regained control over them after battles with the Islamic State Organizations (ISIS).
Poverty forces the IDPs to send their children to work and most of them work in agricultural fields which its wages barely cover their daily needs.
Currently, the two families share everything, as they transformed all furniture into one tent, four meters wide, six meters long and two meters high, in which more than fourteen people live.
According to statements of officials in the AANES, the closure of al-Ya’rubiyah/Tel Kocher border crossing with Iraq for more than two years ago has worsened the living situation for hundreds of thousands of IDPs in the areas.
The AANES repeatedly called on the international community and the United Nations, since the activation of the UN Resolution 2585 (2021), to open al-Ya’rubiyah crossing, and to separate the humanitarian situation from the political interests of some countries.
Activists estimate that the closure of the crossing between Syria and Iraq has caused harm to about two million IDPs and low-income residents in the region.
The closure of the crossing deprived residents of Syria’s northeast of aid estimated at $26.8 million, due to the cessation of support for many organizations operating in the region, president of the Organizations’ Affairs Office in the Jazira Region, Khaled Ibrahim, told North Press previously.
The 20-year-old woman, Asmaa al-Dghemi, an IDP in al-Daher camp, said that women find it embarrassing for them to share the same tents with men.
She believes that things will get worse in winter if families will not get new tents or make their own tents.